LEXI LANDSMAN asks prominent members of the Jewish community to discuss the best three books of the past year that they have read.

ANDREW HARRIS

Freelance photojournalist

ROBERT Mugabe elegises over an empty coffin at a state funeral; bee-keeping in Bosnia helps to explain the meaning of an old man’s life; a son makes sense of his father’s role in the old South Africa – three of my literary highlights for 2009: one shattering novel and two outstanding collections of short fiction.

Shaun Johnson’s incredible postcolonial account of his father’s life on the racial seam of apartheid South Africa, as a liberal-minded civil servant in The Native Commissioner, captures the heartbreaking futility of attempting to affect social change from inside the machinery of an essentially malevolent state.
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BOOK REVIEW: ALAN GOLD

Headlong, by Susan Varga. University of Western Australia Press, $29.95

AS the once-rare problems of an ageing population become commonplace, society will have to come to terms with the prospect of more and more people wanting to put an end to the nightmare their lives have become.

Illness, depression and infirmity are not suitable companions to accompany us into our final years after a lifetime of activity.

Today we’re penalising those who assist their loved ones in releasing themselves from their pain by the act of suicide, but a time will have to come when our lawmakers, ethicists and religious leaders come to see assisted suicide as an act of generous tenderness rather than the crime of murder.
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